Addressing threats to health care's core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.

Monday, September 15, 2008

On the GoozNews blog, Merrill Goozner posted about how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set up a program to educate consumers about direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. It seems that the organization the FDA hired for this purpose is nominally a not-for-profit, but not registered as such with the federal government, and is run by the president of a pharmaceutical marketing agency. The not-for-profit was funded mainly by the marketing agency, and its leadership all have connections with pharma. Sometimes, you just can't make this stuff up. Meanwhile, on the PostScript blog, this post assessed the content of the web-site provided by this program. The site is, shall we say, not terribly skeptical about how the pharmaceutical industry advertises drugs. But what did we expect, given who provided the content?

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